Animal New York

One of the very sad, very creepy men created by video artist Ed Atkins

Joan Miró’s grandson, Joan Punyet Miró, celebrated the opening of the surrealist painter’s exhibition at Kunsthaus in Zurich with a performance that sounds like a scene out of a Hollywood movie where a non-art person starts dating a wacky artist and gets dragged to wild and crazy art world things that don’t make any sense. [artnet News]

Michael H. Miller reports on the latest reality show to take on the art world. This one is called “Art Breakers” which is a pun on, um, “heartbreakers”, and stars two blond girls working in this world. The girls encounter so called “hot” artists nobody has ever heard of at galleries nobody has ever heard of and nobody will ever want to hear of. Needless to say, it sounds terrible. [ARTnews]

This review isn’t great, but it makes me want to see the work. Ed Atkins produces videos populated by uncanny CGI men who seem pretty depressed and lonely. Foreshadowing the ennui of the coming AI generation? [ARTnews]

“Anyone who uses the word ‘prurient’ should never be taken seriously.” -Bucky Turco, of Animal New York, who is being sued by the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat over nude photos of the artist published last year. The photos were shot by Paige Powell, Basquiat’s ex-girlfriend, and published under the headline “And Now, Basquiat’s Actual Balls!” [Artforum]

Dear rest of humanity that are presently alive, how shitty does it feel to be the generation that’s watching Roman ruins that have stood for thousands of years get blown up by the Islamic State? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people? [The Art Newspaper]

Confession: I have not finished reading this article (it is so very long) but it’s worthwhile. Raphael Rubinstein considers the “Total Service Artists” who take on the ancillary tasks of producing, managing, distributing, curating, and historicizing their work. [Art in America]

Wow. The affordable studios in Bjarke Ingles’s insane midtown pyramid start at $565/month. Apply for that (most likely) very competitive lottery now. And in the unlikely event you do end up snagging an apartment, please invite us over for dinner. [Curbed]

Molly Crabapple reports on (and illustrates) the treatment prisoners inside the Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Dallas, specifically focusing on Carrington Keys. The whole story is heart breaking – a life lost in prison, mostly for resisting the status quo. (Whistler blowers like Keys just get beat up and given longer sentences for fictitious crimes.) Keys eventually sued the prison and he now has a video in his hands of his abuse. But that’s new evidence, so he’s stuck in jail for another six months until the prosecution has a chance to properly look at it. [Vice]

Oh god, no. It’s “New Age Week” over at Everything is Terrible, the collective that mines video kitsch to bring viewers the absolute worst (and best) of cultural detritus. This might actually be the most insane/offensive thing they’ve ever found. It comes from the cult/public access television producers Unarius Academy of Science. It features members acting out their “unscripted” past lives, which apparently includes more than enough blackface to get this iteration of Unarius’s practice banned from TV. [Everything is Terrible]

Due on Friday: Submissions to the 3D Additivist Cookbook. If your interests fall in line with speculative machines, disruptive 3D-print technology, or “The Weird,” watch the Additivist Manifesto—or read it—then send in your recipe, whatever form that may take. [Additivist Manifesto]

LaGuardia airport will be demolished and completely rebuilt. The new $4 billion design is a mashup of design concepts from SHoP Architects, Dattner Architects and Present Architecture, who all submitted proposals to replace the troubled airport last year. Construction is supposed to start sometime next year. [Dezeen]

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times Journalist famous for not only supporting the Iraq war but telling the Iraq people to “Suck. On. This.” has actually written an informative column about the Middle East conflict. This column is mercifully short on prescriptive advice and offers a very good history lesson of life since 1979, and the roots of extremism in the region. [The New York Times]

If you want to see the male gaze in action today, then by all means, check out this video of Kim Kardashian repping a new energy drink called Hype. It begins with Kim Kardashian dressed as Audrey Hepburn riding a bike. She’s all by herself, but somehow falls off (what a silly woman!) and finds herself possibly unconscious, dreaming about wearing a powdered-wig and floor-length gown. It’s once we get to this part, the gaze is in full force, showing a close-up of Kardashian’s bosom, then a head-to-toe shot, so that we can see all of her. From Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: “The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look.” [Vulture]

Real estate developers are suing the city of Oakland over new legislation that would construction projects to include one percent of their budgets for public art commissions. They claim it violates their 1st Amendment rights. Bay-Area artists are pissed. [KQED]

In a related story, Gabriel Metcalf argues that the Bay Area’s “progressive” policies are so anti-development that it has become nearly impossible to create new housing to meet the region’s needs. This is especially true of San Francisco, which is no longer a haven for the next generation of leftist thinkers and artists due to its rampant unaffordability. [City Lab]

In other art news from California, a tree fell down outside a children’s museum in Pasadena; eight children suffer injuries, including two who were critically injured. [Associated Press]

London’s National Gallery has had 50 days of staff walkouts so far this year. An all-out staff protest headed up by the Public and Commercial Services Union will begin on August 17. [Reuters]

Paddy Johnson reviews Ryder Ripps’s new exhibition of paintings based on sportswear model Adrienne Ho’s Instagram account at Postmasters. “You could argue what he’s doing is misogynistic, and it probably is, but the total absence of a defensible idea is the larger offense.” Banality and a tin eye, she argues, is ultimate death knell for this show. [artnet News]

N000oooo!!!!!! Skymall is going bankrupt. (Last week’s news, but we’re linking to it today.) Goodbye, space-themed litter boxes and shoe-shaped wine bottle holders. A loss felt not only for sky consumers but also for net art inspiration. [The New York Times]

“Millennials Are Moving to Buffalo and Living Like Kings.” According to the piece, a handful have found sanctuary in Buffalo, New York because the rent is so damn cheap. Like Detroit. Like most everywhere else in this country . [Gothamist]

We linked to Andrew Rice’s story about developers moving into East New York earlier this week, but in light of last night’s panel on gentrification in New York, we’re highlighting it again. While Rice talked to a developer who thinks it will be a while before it’s taken over by hipsters, the lay of the land looks bleak. Near the closing of the essay he writes, “As the rich push the middle class out of brownstone Brooklyn, the middle class has been left with an unenviable choice: leave or compete with the truly poor.” [New York Magazine]

This week, the Paramount Ranch Art Fair, an artist-run fair held in an Old West ghost town, will return, held in conjunction with the blue-chip Art Los Angeles Contemporary Fair. Yes, I would like to see art installed in a saloon. [LA Weekly]

Editors over at The Coveteur are going ape shit over the fact that architect Peter Marino has bought a bunch of brand-name contemporary artwork to decorate his office. He’s got Warhols, Richard Princes, and Robert Mapplethorpes. OoOooh. [The Coveteur]

The entire University of Wisconsin system of colleges and universities will receive $300 million in cuts over the next two years. Thanks, Governor Scott Walker; your possible Republican presidential run won’t please any students or faculty in your state. [Inside Higher Ed]

At the Dallas Museum of Art last week, a bunch of people ran into a dark museum opening and smashed Loris Gréaud’s art. It was a performance, obviously, and Ben Davis wonders whether this kind of “media event” (which seems to have been done just for the press opening) is basically a dumb manifestation of Glenn Lowry’s desire to see art actively “engage audiences.” [artnet News]

Ross W. Ulbricht, the man accused of running the black market website, The Silk Road, has lodged that the prosecutors failed to include a critical part of his defense: a golden emoji. The judge has ruled that the jurors must consider the emojis as part of the evidence. [The New York Times]

Taylor Swift has trademarked lyrics like “this sick beat” and “party like it’s 1989.” Looking at the complete list of phrases—she’s even trademarked her initials—she has a monopoly on any product that could possibly be made with those phrases. Want to make stationary that says “party like it’s 1989”? Nope. Want to make a wig that has “this sick beat” on it? No. Removable tattoo transfers? Absolutely not. Artists could learn a lot from her when it comes to shrewdly protecting their work. [HUH.]

A think piece on the Internet meme known as “snackwave”. To generalize, these are pictures of virtually anything unhealthy; pizzas, burritos, cheetos, burgers etc. [The Hairpin]

Forgery news is pretty dependable content for art pubs, but this one’s for the ages: Employees of the nearly hundred-year-old Uzbek State Art Museum have been caught selling art from the collection and replacing them with forgeries. Chief curator Mirfayz Usmonov has received a nine-year sentence, the Guardian reports. Do people ever successfully get away with this? [The Guardian]

The old Art Moving Projects space has been filled with another art gallery. It’s called Moiety and it’s run by co-founders Joshua Schwartz and Kyle Smith. [Hyperallergic]

The Smithsonian has digitized more than 40,000 works of art from their Asian collection and will make them available to the public in the new year. [The Art Newspaper]

Here’s hoping the hostage situation in Sydney gets resolved without any lost lives. Last night an armed man took over a coffee shop and put up a black sign with white script. The message appeared to be the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith. [The New York Times]

$67 million project to democratize the Louvre. This means signs, wall text and renovations to make the museum more tourist friendly. [The New York Times]

Diane von Furstenberg is one of the moguls behind Manhattan’s new floating park. [New York Magazine]

Animal New York’s latest “Artist’s Notebook” features Rachel Mason, who spent 8 years working on a televisual opera “The Lives of Hamilton Fish”. Research has led her through photographs, newspaper clippings, and correspondence with her subjects’ descendants and a convicted murderer. And tons and tons of notes. [Animal New York]

If you’ve ever been assigned a freelance task last-minute and then ridden a nonstop emotional roller coaster while glued to your screen for hours on end, then you should definitely read artist Sam Rolfes’s “Artist’s Notebook” on ANIMAL New York. Rolfes describes the creative process after being asked by the Avondale Type Co to “reinterpret one of their typefaces, Essay, for a print series”. He documents, in detail, his creative struggle to complete the task. Around day three, he’s hit a wall with the “R” character:

At this point, morale is high, but hygiene is running on fumes and I fear leaving the conference room or the cowering space I’ve ensconced myself in for over 8 hours, lest I be mistaken for a lecherous ghoul by the locals and pelted to death with rocks…Nevertheless, “R” must be vanquished…

This is a series of versions of the letter “R”. It’s a great essay. Read the whole piece on ANIMAL New York.

My tits are so going to win Animal New York’s Very Short Film Festival. In honor of all those kids taking their tops off on Vine, the latest “it” app that allows users to easily shoot and share six second video clips, Animal New York is doing something special: offering a hundred bucks to anyone who can woo them.

Roberta Smith likes the New Barnes and believes the collection should be moved around from time to time. “Blasphemy!” say Barnes purists. Tyler Green says over Twitter that the idea that the collection wasn’t important when it was in Lower Merion is dumb. He’s right, of course, but who exactly is he arguing with? Smith never said that. [NYTimes]

Christopher Knight doesn’t like the new Barnes, but both he and Roberta believe the Matisse stairwell paintings suffer now that they’re not in a stairwell. AFC’s Will Brand noted this morning in the office that New Yorkers already have a Matisse in a stairwell. Is it really necessary to complain that much? [LATimes]

An interview with Lorna Mills on the Triangulation Blog. In answer to the question of whether posting GIFs on Google Plus is promotion, Mills says, “I only think of promotion as posting exhibition info on G+ and Facebook. The rest of the time I’m making GIFs to throw in the G+ streams, so it doesn’t feel like promo, it just feels like participating in a community of GIF makers.” [Triangulation Blog]

The New York Public Library prepares for the future in which all library materials become available through digital devices, and decides to rip the heart out of the central research collection. #longreads [N+1]

Support El Celso’s La Luz (The Light), an installation project in Peru. He’s got under $1,500 to raise. I pledged yesterday—you can too! [Kickstarter]

If you’re swinging by Seven this weekend (it closes Saturday), then you can also catch the tail end of the inaugural group show at the new Williamsburg gallery Reverse Space. The show features work by emerging artists, including AFC friend Armando Veve. [Reverse Space]

Glenn Beck's blog The Blaze momentarily squeezed its head out of Tea Party vagina last night to take a peek at art discourse. As usual, they were appalled. True to Beckian form, wordsmith Jonathon M. Seidl attacked performance artist Nate Hill with a blathering defence for vulnerable white supremacy.

Dasha Zhukhova and her friends in the popular clique have started a magazine. Egypt has a new antiquities chief. The crime wave is up in the art world. Seattle won’t stop talking about how much it loves Dale Chihuly, and it’s getting weird.